


'til I hear it from you

by Heather



Category: Empire Records (1995)
Genre: Gen, Getting to Know Each Other, I swear it's not as dark as all that sounds., Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Eating Disorders, Post-Canon, References to Depression, Sleepovers, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:48:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27251464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heather/pseuds/Heather
Summary: For someone who wanted to be seen as badly as Deb did, Christ, did she fucking panic when she felt too close to being known.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	'til I hear it from you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weakinteraction](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/gifts).



This whole bullshit thing was Jane's idea, and Deb had not yet decided if it was a very good one or a very, very, heinously fucking bad one. It was probably gonna depend on whether or not Gina succeeded in making them all watch _Godzilla_ or not.

"Monster movies are traditional," Gina said, pulling a slice of pizza into tiny pieces, like she was going to feed it to something like a dog or a baby. 

"It's just us," Deb said. "There's no guy looking to cop a feel by cuddling up to you when the beast rises out of the sea." She had her hand on her thigh when she said it, and stuck her middle finger into the upright and locked position on "rises." It made Corey snicker, which was hopefully a point in the against column.

Gina threw one of her pizza nibs at her. "That isn't the point." She looked smug. "They're dumb and easy to follow, and no one's going to be disappointed if they pass out before they get to see Godzilla step on a tourist." She tipped her head sideways, not-quite-pointedly in Corey's direction.

Goddamn it. "I hate dubbed shit," Deb said, groaning. "The mouths don't match the words. It's like kids doing voices for a fish tank."

"You, hate something?" Gina mock-gasped. "What is the world coming to when sunshiny optimistic personalities like yours give in to cynicism?"

Even half-passed out with a brain that was drifting off towards Mars from sheer exhaustion, Corey had better manners. She gave Deb a smile that was so gentle it bordered on dopey and asked, "What _do_ you like?"

Gina was ready before Deb could answer. "Post-World War I German expressionism."

"Am I supposed to even know what that batch of words means?" Deb asked, trying not to make a face.

"Well, if you're too good for Godzilla," Gina said, "I'm guessing your tastes are all refined and brainy-like."

"Yeah, that's the only possible reason someone might not want to watch a guy in a rubber suit stomp on a model of a city. Good job."

Corey stuck a socked foot out from under her blanket, prodding at Gina's face with her toes. "Come on, play nice."

"Ew." Gina swatted her foot away. "If you weren't like totally dying right now, I would be taking this sock off and throwing it in your face. And also declaring it Godzilla Night, because I was brutally attacked by your foot germs!"

"If all I have to do to not watch Godzilla is sniff Corey's feet, that sock is going so far up my nose, I'll swallow it."

"And here I thought I was the kinky one."

"Shh." Corey prodded Gina with her toes again, this time on the shoulder. "I want to know what Deb likes. For real, Deb, I wanna know."

Deb picked at the gauze from the bandage on her wrist. "I think I need beer before I can really give that thought the attention it deserves."

"No beer at Chez Gina, I'm afraid. Mom's immune to used condoms, but she made me eat a cigarette when she found it in here." Gina wrinkled her nose, as if nauseated by the memory all by itself.

"So she might make you eat a beer?" Deb asked, cocking her eyebrow. 

Gina considered this. "Who even knows. Maybe she'd make me smoke it."

Deb was going to have to ask Eddie about how beer might work for bong water. If anyone they knew would know, it would have to be Mark and Eddie.

Corey looked worried in an absent, newborn baby kind of way. Like she only kinda knew what it felt like to be worried, or what the entire emotion of worry was even for, but she was trying. Somewhere under the haze of weeks without sleep and thirteen hours without pills, Corey was working on remembering what it felt like to worry. "Think my dad would make me eat a cigarette if he knew I was here, doing this? Or would he just jump straight to cutting me out of the will?"

Gina didn't seem to know what to say. She just held Corey's foot like she would a hand and squeezed tight, lying her cheek against Corey's shin.

Deb thought that a dad like that would rant and rail, scream and shame, but then quietly send her to Betty Ford for fifteen grand a month and tell everyone she was taking a gap year to backpack in Europe. She also thought that would make Corey feel worse, though, so she said instead, "Oh, definitely the will. He'll leave you two pennies to rub together and give the rest to the dog."

Corey snorted and rubbed her forehead, but she did look less like she was going to cry. She reached down and pulled on a strand of Gina's hair. "I'm not dying."

"Of course not," Gina said, letting go of her. She grabbed the plate of torn up pizza and handed it to her. "You just need to get your strength up."

Corey scarfed the bites down so fast, Deb was sort of surprised she didn't puke them back up right away. She had never seen Corey eat like that before.

Then again, she wasn't sure she had ever seen Corey eat at all before.

Gina noticed it, too, though. "Were you not eating to go with your not sleeping, too?"

Deb just barely stopped herself from asking if that wasn't the point of popping amphetamines like M&Ms. 

Corey rolled her eyes, but also looked a little embarrassed. "I ate when I remembered to eat. I was just busy a lot and never got hungry."

Deb didn't love the little stab of insight that gave her into Corey's addiction. While she herself had gone hungry, half the time for lack of money but embarrassingly as often, to be beautiful and seen, that thought had never crossed Corey's mind at all. Corey had popped pills and passed on meals not at all trying to look like Ally McBeal, but because she was drowning in too much shit to do to make her parents happy.

Deb had wondered from the first time she'd heard Corey's gender-neutral name if she had to try this hard to be perfect to replace a wanted-but-never-gotten son. The fact that she didn't seem to feel pressured to be pretty was another point Deb was going to put in that column.

It could almost be feminist, this raising her to be a career woman schtick, if it weren't still enough to drive Corey to break down in a record store, stomping the shit out of a Rex Manning cutout while she screamed her head off.

Fuck parents, Deb thought.

"If you're coming off a penance fast," Gina said, "then what we really need is ice cream."

"No," Corey half-laughed, half-whined. "It'd be like a dumped girl in a bad comedy. I can't. Besides, I'm lactose intolerant."

Gina rolled her eyes, unconvinced. "Deb just volunteered to snort the dirty sock off your foot. I think we can deal with one of your tiny ladylike farts."

Corey laughed again, blushing. "No!"

"Come on, Deb. Reassure her that she's among friends and friends don't care about bad dairy side effects."

"No thanks, James Joyce," Deb said. "I'd rather Godzilla."

Gina looked at her as though Deb were a fascinating space alien. "So Godzilla is worse than socks, but not as bad as farts. How on earth did you make up your priorities?"

"And how did you know James Joyce was into that?" Corey asked.

Damn. Deb chose to address Corey over Gina. "I read a book, okay? It's been known to happen."

Corey could usually be shamed into silence by little barbs that implied she thought she was better than the rest of them, but today she was just tired enough and shaky enough from withdrawal that she missed it. "Yeah, but the dirty letters of avant-garde modernists? That's so specific."

Deb wanted to point out that Corey had clearly read them, too, but she was pretty sure that wouldn't have the same sting. Corey had probably read the letters of Joyce while researching an AP lit essay that doubled as science homework about the origin of a quark.

Gina was giving off glee so thick, it was almost a smell. "What's this about our Debra reading dirty letters?" She gave Deb a mock-stern look. "Polluting your young mind with modernist perversity?" She seemed to be trying to affect an English school marm, but sounded more and more like the most pompous Sherlock Holmes ever conceived of with each word.

"My mom liked to read me _Finnegan's Wake_ because she thought if she read me enough bullshit while I was little, I would just magically understand it when I grew up."

For someone who wanted to be seen as badly as Deb did, Christ, did she fucking panic when she felt too close to being known. Maybe that was why her instinct in such situations was to drop gigantic truth bombs that scared people off asking further questions. 

It worked as intended. The room felt heavy and oppressive with the force of the things they weren't saying.

Gina, of course, had to be the first one to fight back against it. "I never pictured moms who abandoned their kids as the type who read to them."

"It's not like she read to me because she thought I'd like it," Deb said. "She read it to me because in her coked-out mind, it made sense to bury a kid under a bunch of bullshit they were too young to understand." It wasn't even close to the only thing- and far from the worst thing- that her mother had ever said to her that she was too young to hear. 

"Your mom was on drugs?" Corey asked, soft, with a reluctant sort of interest.

Trying to walk the line between prickly enough to not talk about this and sincere enough not to put her shit on Corey was all but impossible, but Deb tried. "Don't worry, princess. It's not coloring my judgment of you any." Deb fiddled with her boot lace. "You're probably not going to drive to L.A on a bender and then forget me at Disneyland."

"Shit," Gina said, sharp with shock. "Fuck. Is that real? Is that really how your mom walked out?"

"The first time," Deb said. "There were a couple other times after that."

"Shit," Gina said again.

Deb kept her face toward the floor, not looking. She didn't notice that Corey was reaching for her until she was halfway off the couch, reaching for Deb's hand with her dainty little fingers. Deb almost swore out loud when Corey grabbed her hand, cold and crazy strong for somebody who was so sick without pills. 

"I'm sorry," Corey said.

Deb shrugged. "It's not you."

"I know," she said. "But this is what friends do." She grabbed Deb's hand tighter and dragged her up onto the couch, squeezing Deb between her body and the back cushions.

Deb could not remember the last time someone had fucking _cuddled_ her, if anyone ever even had, and shit, shit, shit, how were you supposed to do this? Where the fuck did her hands go?

Corey didn't seem to notice. She pulled one of Deb's arms over her and left the other wedged between Deb's chest and her back. 

Gina was looking at them in a way that made Deb wary of possible judgmental comments, but it turned out to be jealousy. "Why don't I get 'your mom is shitty' cuddles?"

Corey flapped an arm in her direction, obviously inviting her up, and before Deb knew it, Gina was lying on her back on top of both of them.

"Ow," Deb said. She tried to pull the arm that was around Corey to freedom, or at least to where a button on Gina's skirt wasn't digging into her wrist, but neither of the other two seemed to want to cooperate with that plan. Deb was stuck between two bodies that cared about her, her arm slowly going numb. 

"Shhh," Gina said. "Let us love you."

Deb made a face, but in this position, neither of them could see it anyway.

Corey peeked at Deb under Gina's back. Her eyes seemed brighter and more curious in this light, less glazed over and zombie-like. "You don't have to be tough all the time, you know," she said. "We're still gonna be with you even if you tell us about the shitty things."

Deb opted not to say anything, for fear of saying something stupid or mean or harsh. Or possibly breaking down crying because this person that she never thought noticed her actually cared, maybe even cared a whole awful lot. 

Corey gave her a tremor-y little smile and squirmed under Gina so that she could kiss Deb's forehead.

"Are you two having a Hallmark moment down there?" Gina asked, mock-suspicious and way too loud.

Corey snickered, and held her finger to her lips, like the Hallmark moment that was 100% being had was just their little secret. "No," she said, loudly, for Gina's benefit.

"Are you sure?" Gina asked, louder and with even more exaggerated suspicion.

Deb didn't know it was possible to feel like laughing so soon after she had felt like crying. "We're sure."

"Okay." Gina squirmed a little, trying to get comfortable while still lying on top of both of them. It was apparently an effort. "Hey," she said out of nowhere, mid-squirming her butt against Deb's hip.

"What?" 

"You never said what movie you like," Gina said.

There was a beat.

"You know," Deb said, "I was always really into _Thelma and Louise._ "

Corey's hand tightened on Deb's again, like a promise. _You were there for me when the worst shit went down. I'll hold your hand when the worst goes down for you. Even if we both go over the cliff._

The choice was not lost on Gina, either, but she didn't reach for Deb's hand. She just gave her a smile that was half-joke, half-serious, all loving sincerity. "Well," she said, "it's no Godzilla, but it'll do." Then she rolled off of them and went back for the pizza, dragging Corey with her, the two of them immediately falling into soothing chatter about the merits of pepperoni vs sausage.

Deb watched them in fond bewilderment and thought, _Okay, fine. I'll tell Jane this was a rollicking success._


End file.
